Meet the community at FOSDEM and GodotCon 2019

By: Rémi Verschelde Nov 07, 2018

Winter is coming upon those of us in Europe, and it's time to plan our biggest yearly community meetup again, GodotCon Brussels!

Like the pasttwo years, we will attend FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium (Sat 2 & Sun 3 February 2019). And like the past two years, we'll hold our own Godot Conference (GodotCon) event right after (Mon 4 & Tue 5 February), so that you can plan to attend both events and get your fill of FOSS and Godot.

And on top of that, we're also going to meet before FOSDEM (Thu 31 January & Fri 1 February) with engine and documentation contributors for our first Godot Sprint: since both FOSDEM and GodotCon are always quite hectic, we want to take our time with existing and aspiring contributors to actually get some work done. The sprint will be focused on discussing features and important bug reports with core devs, reviewing Pull Requests, discussing the roadmap for the next versions, writing documentation, etc.

Our lead developer Juan "reduz" Linietsky will be flying over from Buenos Aires for the occasion, and many other core engine developers will be there, so it should be a great time as usual to discuss all things Godot.

Where do I sign up?

All three events are free of charge for everyone, and for the FOSDEM you do not even need to register: just show up and say hi at the Godot stand!

For the Godot Sprint and GodotCon however, registration is mandatory as we need to know how many persons will be there to find appropriate venues in Brussels. To help us with the organization, we ask that you register as soon as possible.

You can also indicate on that form if you plan to attend FOSDEM, so that we know who to expect.

FOSDEM 2019

FOSDEM is the major European event focusing on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). We will have a stand there where you can meet and discuss with many Godot contributors and users.
We will be distributing and selling some goodies (T-Shirts, stickers) and most importantly presenting our favourite engine and some games to the FOSDEM visitors. More than 8,000 visitors are awaited, and we hope that many will be impressed by Godot 3.x and the games made with it!

There might be Godot-related talks, but we are still waiting for a confirmation from the FOSDEM organizers (the event is increasingly popular and they have hundreds of talk proposals to choose from).

The FOSDEM is a great opportunity to discover new projects from top-notch free software contributors. It will also be the occasion to meet other Godot users and contributors, at our stand or around a few Belgian beers :)

GodotCon Brussels 2019

Two days in a crowded event is not enough! To get more time together to actually discuss our projects, learn new things and discover engine features together, we are organizing a 2-day event focused on Godot right after the FOSDEM (on Monday 4 and Tuesday 5).

Registrations are just starting, but given the recent growth of the community we expect around 100 attendees (we had ~60 last year); we'll size things accordingly so we need you to register as fast as possible to help us with the organization.

There will soon be a Call for Proposals so that everyone can propose a talk, a workshop or any kind of activity that we could do during those two days. Last year was a big success, and we expect the new GodotCon to be even better, both due to the higher number of attendees and the impressive growth of the engine since the 3.0 release!

The exact venue is still to be determined, as soon as we have a good overview about our numbers.

Godot Sprint

And since four days IRL is still not enough when we're working together remotely all over the year, we're adding a third event just before FOSDEM dedicated to getting things done. This contributor sprint will be primarily intended for existing engine and documentation contributors, so that we can work on current topics together, review Pull Requests, discuss the roadmap, etc. We will also welcome users who aren't contributors yet but would like to get involved, be it with C++ engine contributions, documentation writing or the creation of other teaching materials (demos, courses, etc.).

Having this sprint before FOSDEM will allow us to some work on the engine before the GodotCon, so that core contributors are fully available to GodotCon attendees afterwards.

The venue is still to be determined. Depending on our numbers it might be the same as the GodotCon venue, or a smaller one.